Rain has made us wait nearly three hours. And when it arrives, it’s 11 overs a side rather than 20. This has a lot of consequences, but we are mostly worried about one of them.
The world’s first sighting of Jasprit Bumrah vs Vaibhav Sooryavanshi could have happened last year. It could have happened three days after Sooryavanshi played that innings. He has played many innings since then that merit that italicised emphasis, but you know the one we’re talking about.
Anyway, this meeting could have happened in Jaipur, on May 1, 2025. But long before Bumrah came on to bowl, Sooryavanshi was gone, out for a two-ball duck.
Deepak Chahar had dismissed Sooryavanshi that day, and on this day in Guwahati – April 7, 2026 – it is Chahar once more who bowls the first over.
All these thoughts, then, come to our minds as Rajasthan Royals vs Mumbai Indians gets underway in Guwahati. What if Chahar gets Sooryavanshi again? What if he doesn’t, but MI bring Bumrah on too late for the promised tete-a-tete? What if the trajectories of protagonist and antagonist simply don’t collide, because of the shrunken canvas of this contest? What if rain comes back and ends it before it even begins?
Chahar doesn’t get Sooryavanshi. Yashasvi Jaiswal faces all six balls of the first over. He goes 4, 6, 4, 0, 4, 4, and this might have been the talk of the country on another day, but not this one.
On this day, we talk about it for exactly the length of one ad break, because here it is. After all that waiting, and almost without warning.
Next to Bumrah’s name on the scorecard is 0-0-0-0. Next to Sooryavanshi’s is 0(0). They have never faced each other before. It is only apt now that both their slates are clean.
Bumrah, 32 years and 122 days old, is unarguably the best bowler in the world. Sooryavanshi, at 15 years and 11 days, is less than half as old. He is yet to play for his country, but you can make the case already that he’s one of the best batters in the world without coming across as being out of your mind.
In December 2024, on T20 debut for Bihar against Rajasthan, at the age of 13 years and 241 days, Sooryavanshi scored 13. That innings included two sixes. His next T20 game was his IPL debut, for RR against Lucknow Super Giants last year. He hit his first ball for six..
Before Tuesday night’s game against MI, Sooryavanshi had hit 68 sixes in 378 balls in T20 cricket. That’s one every 5.6 balls. Jaiswal, one of the very best T20 openers in India, had hit 160 sixes in 2490 balls: one every 15.6 balls.
By no measure is Sooryavanshi normal. What he does now shouldn’t surprise anyone.
And it doesn’t. It isn’t surprising. It is, instead, like all the times we have watched genius in action: breathtaking and inevitable.
Bumrah’s first ball to Sooryavanshi is not Bumrah’s best ball. It isn’t hard length like he typically bowls with the new ball. It isn’t the bouncer, which would have fit the man-vs-golden-boy theme very nicely. It isn’t the yorker or the slower ball, both of which Bumrah bowls better than pretty much everyone else on the planet, and both of which could be, theoretically, decent options against a batter of Sooryavanshi’s extravagant, curlicued backlift and unfettered bat-swing.
It isn’t any of those things. It’s a slot ball, delivered from over the wicket, a leg-stump half-volley to the left-hand batter. It’s the kind of ball Bumrah almost never bowls. At 131.2kph, it isn’t even quick.
And Sooryavanshi, in a slightly open position after a small trigger movement – back foot first, then front – doesn’t even have to move his feet. He doesn’t even have to bring the entirety of his celebrated bat-swing into this shot. This is a checked drive by his standards, more wrist than arms, and the ball sails over wide long-on and into the pink-cladded wall of a middle-tier stand.
The cliche would have been for the 15-year-old to let the occasion get to him. You would be silly to make the case that the occasion has got to Bumrah of all people, but there’s an undeniable narrative potency to it.
Bumrah is back to business with his next ball. He corrects his length, goes off-pace, and offers no room. And it allows Sooryavanshi to demonstrate a facet of his game that he hasn’t always needed to because of his power and hitting range. He bunts this ball into the leg side, towards midwicket but with soft enough hands to pick up a comfortable single.
Is that it, then? Two balls? Will Sooryavanshi still be around for Bumrah’s next over if he doesn’t get on strike again in this one?
Jaiswal, who may deep down have some sense that he is playing a walk-on part despite batting on 22 off 6, mercifully takes a single next ball.
Two balls in, Bumrah vs Sooryavanshi has brought us a bad ball, rightly punished, and a good one, calmly negotiated.
Round three is better. It isn’t the best short ball Bumrah has bowled, but it’s a good one. Angling towards Sooryavanshi’s ribcage, tucking him up. Or that’s the idea.
We have all watched unnaturally gifted batters do their thing and wondered what separates them from their peers. We have done this many, many times. The answer is always the same thing. The best ones just pick length quicker than the rest. A fraction quicker, to get into position a fraction earlier.
This ribcage ball is meant to tuck Sooryavanshi up, but that idea is predicated on him taking a normal length of time to get into position. He is in position before anyone should have a right to, with a swift transfer of weight onto his back foot that allows his hips to open up.
Sooryavanshi has been likened to a lot of great batters, two in particular: Sachin Tendulkar for his precocity, Brian Lara for the extravagant backlift (he says he grew up watching Lara’s videos). There’s one name he hasn’t yet been spoken of alongside, but in this shot off Bumrah is a ghostly flicker of the greatest of them all.
Of all the shots Donald Bradman played, it was the pull his contemporaries spoke of in the most awed tones, specifically of how quickly he’d get into position. Like he knew what was coming long before the bowler had delivered.
And a century before Sooryavanshi, Bradman was known for his unusual backlift. Not an unusually high one like Lara’s or Sooryavanshi’s, with that exaggerated cocking of the wrists, but an unusually wide one: his bat would move away from the body initially, towards gully, and then come down tracing a figure-of-8 shape.
Sooryavanshi’s bat traces a similar arc – outwards at first, then looping round. Against this sort of ball it allows him to get his bat round quicker than a straighter backlift would, and that’s after he gets into position incredibly, shockingly, even unfairly early. He swivels to send it high and long over square leg, a sweet 79m.
Three balls, two sixes. The last two balls of this over are almost anticlimactic, not particularly good balls met with the timing slightly off, and they go by with all of us still buzzing from what preceded them. And with that, episode 1 of Bumrah vs Sooryavanshi is done.
After waiting nearly a year, and after nearly three more hours of wondering if it would happen at all, we have finally witnessed it. And it has been worth every minute of the wait.
